I am going to throw a startling neologism at you, but do not let it put you off. In one corner of the internet men are “looksmaxxing” – in other words seeking to optimise their physical appearance through diet, exercise, surgery, injections, supplements, skincare, sleep hygiene, you name it.
Women have been doing this for some time now, granted, but consider the glass floor smashed. This is an all-gender pursuit in 2026.
Bimaxillary osteotomy – that’s double jaw surgery to you – ranks among the most extreme interventions for men insecure about their effete chins. Meanwhile women – take a look at impossibly youthful Kris Jenner (70) or uncannily ageless Christina Aguilera (45) – are getting facelifts so precise and so advanced that they defy that otherwise famously relentless passage of time.
And don’t forget that pretty much anyone can artificially stem their appetite with a GLP-1 (Ozempic, semaglutide) now. Botox is so commonplace it’s barely more hassle than a haircut.
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Looking like oneself, with no intervention, is for normies these days. And, before you start, no, this isn’t like the centuries-old tradition of make-up or the relatively established procedure of rhinoplasty. This is something very different: why succumb to normal laws of mortality when you can tweak, fiddle, hone, sculpt and shift every centimetre of your body in pursuit of the perfect version of yourself? Plastic surgery used to be conspicuous, it is good now because it is invisible.
At some point over the 2010s Instagram introduced “filters” through its camera app, a clever trick of the lens that rendered your human face in a slightly more attractive digital form. Well, thank you technology, we can take that version of ourselves once confined to a phone screen and beam it out, incarnate, into the world. Smoother, more angular, less real, inhuman. In that aeons-long battle of nature vs nurture, nature has been consummately defeated. Bad luck.
You know, I shouldn’t be so shallow. Because it is not just in the realm of our physical appearance that we are defying our basic atomic structure. Indeed, technological advances (forgive the imprecise phrase) are making us less human with every innovation.
Take for example that ancient porn habit. There was a time when men would have to inspect the sides of a painted terracotta pot to observe a sex scene. Then until recently it was magazines in the shed or dial-up internet. Now with the tools of mass-production and mass-dissemination, and platforms such as OnlyFans that cut out the need for studios and middlemen, the 2020s have heralded a brave new world for sex-on-the-internet. Or sex-on-demand.
Indeed, porn addiction among young men is reaching such a dangerous precipice that the British government is trying to ban it among under-18s. (Do you know how bad something has to be for the government of the country where I live to do anything decisive about it?)
We all know how the story goes: 14-year-old boys are accessing pornography online so violent and so explicit it would scramble the senses of even the most libidinal adult just a few decades ago. And in functionally infinite quantity. Some men’s first – and increasingly only – sexual encounter is with a bunch of pixels on a screen. Or, as Caitlin Flanagan put it in the Atlantic, men are learning to have sex without women.
Then to add to the melee – sex happens on the internet, faces are designed to defy the basic laws of nature – we have the small matter of artificial intelligence.
Take all the lonely men, driven away from women by virtue of their online porn addiction, turning to ChatGPT for free therapy. Then think of the few real-life couples asking the clever chat bot for relationship advice. It can mediate human conflict through its supercomputer brain. It can imitate intimacy, too. It could just be your friend. Whatever it is, it mollifies the need for a real life, in person, hard-to-navigate messy relationship. And what’s better? It lives in your phone.
There is a saying (overused to the point of almost-intolerable cliche) that going bankrupt happens slowly then all at once. I cannot tell if we are in the “slowly” or “all at once” stage of this particular process.
But I do know we are forsaking all the traits that make us human – sex, relationships, wrinkles, soft jawlines, imperfect advice, awkward weight gain – just because technological progress says we can. You can be neither a Luddite nor a fogey and still wonder if all this might have some undesirable downstream effects.
I am thinking back to the sad boys and their “looksmaxxing” ways. You have to ask what it is all for? The injections, the extreme surgery, the constant self-surveillance, the wilfulness with which they are stripping all the joy out of their lives. And for what? To look good for their computer screens? Forgive this despairing column, but I really do think it is that serious.
